The announcement ends some of the speculation about Brazil’s future: the renderer, formerly known as Brazil r/s and used in everything from visualisation to Superman Returns, was acquired from original developer SplutterFish by Caustic Graphics – which was itself acquired by Imagination in 2010.

According to the news release, the software has now been rebuilt around Imagination’s OpenRL API to position it as an interactive raytracing engine.

The technology is being licensed to other developers to create integrated viewports in other applications.

According to Imagination, shaders created within Brazil r/s 2.0 will still work within Brazil 3.0-based software.

The Brazil 3.0 SDK is currently in beta, with a commercial release expected by the end of the year.

Updated 12 August: this interesting thread on the old SplutterFish forums has some more information on Brazil 3.0 – and some actual test renders.

PRESS RELEASE (Excerpts)
Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia and communications technologies company, is showing with partners the first examples of a growing portfolio of solutions based on the new Brazil™ 3.0 beta interactive ray tracing renderer, built using Imagination’s ground-breaking Caustic ray tracing technologies including the OpenRL™ API, at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver Canada (Booth 129, August 9-11).

Imagination is demonstrating the beta version of its powerful new rendering engine, called Brazil 3.0, to address the next generation of high quality fully interactive ray traced rendering across a broad range of markets from CAD and industrial design through to gaming and cinematic quality content creation. Brazil 3.0 embraces the features and capabilities of a world class renderer, but introduces fully dynamic geometry support enabling full rendering and manipulation of ray traced rendered objects on the fly.

Brazil 3.0 is a completely new renderer implementation, designed from the ground up for real-time, interactive high quality visualization. Thanks to the speed of Brazil 3.0, users can now edit everything in a scene on the fly – including geometry, lights, materials and shaders – enabling truly interactive real-time high quality ray tracing-based visualization.

Brazil 3.0 is built using OpenRL, Imagination’s ray tracing API that it intends to promote as an open industry standard. OpenRL is designed to work on any graphics hardware, including Imagination’s forthcoming Caustic Professional ray-tracing board level solutions.

Brazil 3.0 builds on the success and renowned capabilities of the Splutterfish Brazil RS batch-based rendering system, one of the industry’s most highly respected and widely recognized cinematic quality renderers. Brazil RS is still used by many industry leaders today more than ten years after it was first conceived.

When Brazil 3.0 is released, artists and designers who have built up libraries of shaders and materials based on Brazil RS 2.0 maps and materials will be able to use them in Brazil 3.0, creating a convenient path for users wishing to migrate from the Brazil RS 2.0 renderer to Brazil 3.0 based solutions.

The Brazil 3.0 SDK beta enables Caustic Insider ecosystem partners to develop plug-ins to any tool environment or other application. Partners are using the Brazil 3.0 SDK beta to start developing plug-ins to create fully integrated viewports within well-known tool environments, delivering high quality ray traced imagery in a truly interactive environment for the first time. It has been integrated directly into the 3D viewports of many of the industry’s most popular industrial design packages, including Autodesk® Maya® and Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2012, and Robert McNeel & Associates Rhinoceros®.

Now artists and designers can create and visualize concept models right within their favorite modeling tool, eliminating the necessity and burden of exporting scenes to a third-party design visualization package. Several examples of these plug-ins will be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2011 on Imagination’s booth.

The Brazil 3.0 SDK is based on OpenRL, the only ray tracing API that is fully device independent and can leverage multiple compute devices simultaneously. Built using similar paradigms to those used in the Khronos family of OpenGL ES, OpenGL and OpenCL APIs, OpenRL has the unique ability of supporting dynamic geometry by updating its acceleration structure to account for transformations, and vertex modifications to any model within the scene.

Expert presentations will take place through the day at the SIGGRAPH 2011 Exhibition on the Imagination booth #129, showing the benefits of interactive visualization in CAD and creative content creation applications, including demonstrations of real time ray-traced viewport rendering with fully dynamic geometry to manipulate the rendered object on the fly.

The Brazil 3.0 SDK beta programme is open now to all software tools developers. Contact causticpro@imgtec.com for more details.